This great see-saw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it.
— from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

That act then involved no essential change in God.
— from Know the Truth: A Critique on the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation Including Some Strictures Upon the Theories of Rev. Henry L. Mansel and Mr. Herbert Spencer by Jesse Henry Jones

We are taught nothing on this subject, by reflection, that is not entirely confirmed by observation.
— from The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

With all the splendor of versification in the work, it contains but few metres of which the English tongue is not equally capable.
— from Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

At all events, if nothing else could be decided upon, the alms-house must receive him.
— from Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Herman Melville

A contradiction between two types of study, where one simplifies the other, is not easily conceivable.
— from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

Although there is no especial Cherokee story connected with the name, White (Historical Collections of Georgia, p. 660) makes it the subject of a long pseudo-myth, in which Hiwassee, rendered “The Pretty Fawn,” is the beautiful daughter of a Catawba chief, and is wooed, and at last won, by a young Cherokee warrior named Notley, “The Daring Horseman,” who finally becomes the head chief of the Cherokee and succeeds in making perpetual peace between the two tribes.
— from Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology by James Mooney

If nothing else could be done I would load a cord of wood on a wagon and take it to the city for sale.
— from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant

And, as in a body which is diseased the addition of a touch from without may bring on illness, and sometimes even when there is no external provocation a commotion may arise within—in the same way wherever there is weakness in the State there is also likely to be illness, of which the occasion may be very slight, the one party introducing from without their oligarchical, the other their democratical allies, and then the State falls sick, and is at war with herself; and may be at times distracted, even when there is no external cause.
— from The Republic by Plato

"The people of Great Britain having found, from re [Pg 60] peated experiments, how precarious their libertys were in the hands of the princes who founded their title to govern them in hereditary right,—that however absurd the pretence was in itself, no example could make them forego a claim which so much flattered their ambition, and upon which only, with any shew of reason, arbitrary power and tyranny can be built at last,—determined to secure (as far as human prudence can) the possession of that inestimable blessing to themselves and posterity by fixing the royal power in a family whose only title should be the free choice of the people, and who, should they attempt, would be restrained from inslaving those they governed, and would not only act most absurdly, but might reckon upon having the same voice of the people against them.
— from Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. Volume II. by Thomson, A. T., Mrs.

What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit; but the [Pg 280] childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside.
— from What I Saw in America by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

The "we" may become "I;" but this is no essential change.
— from Toasts and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say the Right Thing in the Right Way by William Pittenger

Poverty sits at His very feet and it is not even curious; fashion and vice, toil and sport, science and ruin, culture and ignorance, want and opulence pass by, and do not so much as despise and reject Him—for that at least would argue some form of interest.
— from Men in the Making by Ambrose Shepherd

"If nobody else complained, I shouldn't," said Mrs. MacHugh.
— from He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope

Had the Holy Office not promised him immunity, nay, even canonisation—had not Madame de Montpensier——?
— from The White Plumes of Navarre: A Romance of the Wars of Religion by S. R. (Samuel Rutherford) Crockett

Although the success of co-operative banks has been great in nearly every country of Continental Europe, nowhere else has it been so great as in Germany, the country of their origin, and it is to Germany one naturally turns first for suggestions.
— from Readings in Money and Banking Selected and Adapted by Chester Arthur Phillips